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>eventually somebody needs to be paid to do the work >That person or entity has to get paid somehow In my experience, it is very hard to get companies to even
by cycloptic 6y ago
>eventually somebody needs to be paid to do the work
>That person or entity has to get paid somehow
In my experience, it is very hard to get companies to even admit what the real cost of open sourcing something like this is. Lots of them just don't even want to talk about it or show their estimates at all, they just say "we will never open source" like Qualcomm does and the conversation goes nowhere. Even if the price is very high and it takes many years, we still need to start somewhere. Then the industry as a whole can chip away at it slowly, because even very slow progress is better than nothing at all. And what's even worse than no progress is if we just give up and sit around waiting for some other company like Google or Apple to foot 100% of the bill to redo all the work over again from scratch.
- g_p 6y agoI think part of the unwillingness is due to the incorporation of external third party IP they realise they have no real prospect of being able to get a license to open source. In some areas like imaging this always seemed to be particularly problematic - from memory, some of the early "Sony Mobile" Android devices (thinking Xperia Z, Z2 era, etc.) actually used TrustZone DRM to prevent use of certain imaging libraries they had "licensed in", in order to discourage/prevent reverse engineering of them by users that had unlocked the bootloader and thus would likely have root access to facilitate meddling with them. I believe that people eventually removed the TrustZone checks, but the intent was clear. This isn't Qualcomm directly though, but I imagine it shows part of the root of the challenge here.